


we take what we feel we deserve

by drakarifire



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Fix-It, Homophobic Language, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Munchausen by proxy, Not Beta Read, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Torture, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:27:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26328637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drakarifire/pseuds/drakarifire
Summary: What mother would kill her son with love?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 7
Kudos: 69
Collections: Labor Day Book Quote Challenge (2020)





	we take what we feel we deserve

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is for the Labor day book quote challenge!  
> I struggled a bit with this one, and I feel like the end is a little shaky-  
> but I'm still kind of proud of what it is regardless. 
> 
> It was fun to write some pain and suffering at least u-u

In the end it’s not Richie’s fault for getting stuck in the deadlights and telling him he’s brave enough. It’s not Bev’s for giving him a weapon and telling him it kills monsters if he believes it does. It’s not Mike’s for calling him back to Derry or even Bill’s for bringing him into this fight all those years ago. Fuck, it’s not even the fucking clown’s fault… though the hole through his chest isn’t doing him any favors. 

He’s dying, and the only one at fault for it is his mother. 

Maybe that’s a bit cruel. Sonia Kaspbrak has been dead for years now, cremated and sitting in an urn above his living room couch. Her final wish to be forever peering over her son’s shoulder granted. 

He’s an adult now. Forty years old and perfectly capable of making his own decisions and taking responsibility for his own actions...or, at least he’d thought so anyway. Before he’d come back to Derry and realized that Sonia Kaspbrak had taken a pillow and pressed it over everything that he was, snuffing out what he could have been. Eddie Kaspbrak, the real and honest version of himself, was dead and buried under a mountain of medical anxiety and bitter resentment for the world. 

He’d cared once. Not about the kind of impression he made or the amount of money he could realistically drop on something as unnecessary as Gucci loafers. He’d cared about people, not what they thought about him, not his mother’s opinion. He’d cared about his friends...he’d actually had friends.The real Eddie, the Eddie that stood at the forefront of a rock fight and dove headfirst into a sewer with a broken arm, would have done anything for the Losers. Yet here he was spending over a decade alone, hunched over his computer with a spreadsheet in one hand and a bottle of sanitizer in the other. Too scared to eat, too scared to shake hands, too scared to so much as sit in the same room as a jar of peanut butter. 

She’d done it. 

After all those years spent trimming him down and slicing him up, she’d finally managed to do what she’d always set out to do in the first place. Sonia Kaspbrak had turned her son into a coward scared of his own shadow. She’d hated the Losers for the tiny glimpse of truth into himself they’d granted him and had wasted no time in squirreling him away after that fateful summer. Ripping him out by the tender, still growing roots, and potting him up to sit prim and proper on her window ledge. 

Richie’s words echo like a mockery in the back of his mind, reverberating in the fading clamor of his thoughts. Thinking is getting harder now, but he can still hear it loud as bells. You’re braver than you think. What a load of bullshit. He wants to say it out loud. Almost does when Richie’s looking at him, but god that’d be a cruel fucking joke wouldn’t it? Spitting his words back into his face with blood flecks dusted across them. Richie is already covered in his blood, black in the dim light. He doesn’t need Eddie ripping a bite out of him too. 

Instead he says a joke that’s not really a joke and feels himself regret it almost instantly. Something like hope dims in Richie’s eyes, like he was expecting something else and fuck- Eddie was too, but he’s too tired to think of something else and he can’t take it back. He should have said “Don’t worry,” or “I’m not going anywhere,” or maybe even “I love you,” or hell even just a “goodbye.” 

Only all those words are either too much or an outright lie, and Richie doesn’t deserve any of that either. Not that he deserves a fucking mom joke, but none of them really deserve any of this...and sure Eddie was a type A asshole for most of his adult life, but he’s pretty sure that didn’t give the universe license to shishkabob him. Or maybe this is just what happens to mean old cowards who marry their mothers. They end up in sewers, bleeding out slow, and wishing they had the fucking guts to tell their best friend something more important than “I fucked your mom.” 

Then again, maybe Richie will get it, somehow. He used to be smart, right? He remembers copying Richie’s homework before school sometimes and always getting A’s on it. Maybe Richie will see through the bullshit. He knows from the look on Richie’s face that he won’t...but he can dream right? Will death let him do that much? Can he at least still have this one thing? 

Eddie doesn’t think death would be so kind. 

It’s already dark down here, but it’s gotten darker. Things turn black the moment Richie gets up to help their friends, like he’s taking all the light with him. Maybe he is. Once upon a time Richie Tozier used to be little Eddie Kaspbrak’s life, and maybe if he’d had enough time it would have felt like that again. 

Richie told him to keep pressure on the wound but he’s long since lost all feeling in his limbs. The pain is gone and there’s fear in that. Sharp and visceral even through the fading numbness of everything else. Pain means he’s alive, despite all his mother might have told him to the contrary, and the absence of it means he’s dead. Deader than he felt walking down the aisle at his own wedding. 

“Look what they’ve done to my sweet boy.” The grating coo of Sonia Kaspbrak’s voice feels almost too real. Seeping out of the darkness to caress his skin like a slimy hand and sending an uncomfortable shiver through a body he’d started to forget was even there. “Eddie-bear. What have I told you about those kids?” 

He swears then, however impossible it seems, that he can smell the bitter overly-fruity tang of her diabetic breath. Feel a burst of it hot against the skin of his face, making his nose scrunch and his lips recoil, gagging on a mouthful of blood. 

It’s nothing. It’s your brain dying. She’s not really here.   
The blood soaked leather jacket beneath his palm moves, shifts and is pulled out of his barely existent grip. He wants to grasp for it, press it close or at the very least cover the gaping hole in his chest like he’s trying to preserve his modesty. Save some part of himself that his mother hasn’t left her fingerprints all over. 

“It’s okay Eddie-bear. Mommy’s here.” He wishes he could see her almost as much as he’s glad that he can’t. Wishes even harder that he’d just...die already, when the touch of her pudgy fingers skims the edges of his wound. 

“Mommy-” He doesn’t have much left in him, barely enough for that one word. It wheezes out of him sounding like an unoiled hinge, or the whistle of the wind through reeds. 

Is this real? 

Is this actually happening? 

The touch is so feather light at first he thinks it really might be a dream. A last dying figment of his imagination as his synapses burst into nothingness one last time. He envies every person who’s near-death experience was accompanied by white lights and relived memories, while he gets...this. 

Then, suddenly, he’s screaming. 

The blackness fades as pain lances through him so viciously he thinks maybe he’s reliving the claw bursting from his chest. Previously limp hands find some final desperate strength as they try to claw at the hand digging into the hole in his chest, bloodied fingers slipping on the familiar nylon of one of his mother’s tracksuits. Wide, terrified eyes, focus on Sonia Kaspbrak’s smiling face as she pushes her hand deeper into his chest cavity, pushing and prodding like a surgeon until he can feel the pads of her fingertips against the frantic pounding of his heart. 

It’s...there are no words for the feeling of it. The way he feels his heart pound like it’s trying to run from the intrusion but is instead cornered and trapped in the cage of his ribs. 

This should kill him. He knows it. He was dead or dying already- why is he still alive. Why is she here? 

“Shh, Eddie-bear. Mommy’s got you.” She shifts, and her arm goes impossibly deeper into his chest, ripping a sob out of him as his hands dig and claw at her elbow. 

“Mommy- please-” His words are choked out of him cut off by another rush of blood pouring from his mouth and down his chin, another pained sob as her hand closes impossibly around his panicked heart. He can hear the squelch of it, feel his organs shifting to accommodate the intrusion. Whatever Pennywise left of his shredded insides displaced by her arm. He can’t see it but he can picture it: gore overflowing the edges of him like a sink with the tap running. Red red red. Like Bev’s hair. Like Bev’s bathroom. 

“What did I tell you Eddie? About those friends of yours? About Richie.” She curls her fist and nails prick against his heart like talons. “He’s got a secret, you know? You can just see it in his face. A dirty little secret.” 

He tries to gasp, to breathe in so he can speak, but all it does is drag blood down his throat and make him cough. He hates it. Hates the way it rips another scream out of him, hates how her arm shifts inside of him, tightening its grip. 

“Richie is always thinking dirty things about you, Eddie. Things boys shouldn’t think about other boys.” She’s leaning over him and he feels like he’s shrinking. Growing smaller in the overwhelming berth of her presence. “Did you know he wants to fuck you Eddie? He wants to ruin my precious little boy. Put his dirty faggot hands all over you?” 

Her hand tightens around his heart with an audible squelch and when he screams this time it drowns in a gurgle of blood. 

“Doesn’t he know that you’re mine Eddie-bear? Don’t you remember how much mommy loves you?” 

Somewhere far away he can hear the other Losers. Their shouted insults have turned to screams, echoing down the narrow chamber as white noise. A background soundtrack to his own agony. Fear has become a physical thing. It thickens the darkness around him, makes his eyesight blur and turns his mother into a grotesque amalgamation of the woman who raised him, the woman he’d married, and the leper he’d run from as a child. Boils burst fresh between the folds of her double chin, sores blossomed like diseased flowers across her lips as they pulled back to reveal rotting yellowed teeth. 

Suddenly he was five again trying to squirm out of her grasp. He was thirteen and scrubbing the touch of her lies and the feel of her hands from his skin until the water turned red. He was sixteen and alone and believing that only one person could ever possibly love someone as frail and cowardly as him. He was 28 and married, and clutching the toilet of his honeymoon suite because he finally had sex with the woman in the other room and it made bile rise up in his throat. 

“This is mine Eddie.” She clutches his heart in her hand and he’s certain that she’s going to rip it right out of him. 

Part of him wants her to. He wants to stop feeling pain. He wants to just fucking die already. Wasn’t getting a hole torn through him enough? 

He’s just so goddamn tired. 

“Your friends are dying because of you Eddie. Because you’re weak. Because you’re scared.” The screams seem to get louder, someone far away screaming for Bill- or Ben, he can’t tell. “Do you hear them? That’s your fault Eddie. My weak, sick little boy…” 

“I’m not…” 

The hand around his heart squeezes again and he’s drowning in a flood of his own blood. Eyes rolling up towards the roof of the tunnel, hand slipping from it’s weak grip on his mother’s arm. There’d been parts of himself he’d tried so hard to keep from her, parts of who he was that he’d hidden away even without his memories, so she’d never have them. His heart- he’d left that with Richie, with the Losers. Except now here she was, with her hands literally all over it, her fingerprints burning into him, her nails damaging the one piece of himself he had left. 

“Oh, but you are, aren’t you? Just like your father Eddie-bear. Weak. Sickly. A coward.” Her tongue flicks out, it’s impossibly long and prehensile. Slick with slime and glistening in the dark. He watches it terrified, as it slithers up his cheek. Clamps his mouth shut when he feels it edging dangerously close to his lips. “Give mommy a little kiss Eddie-” She taunts, tongue lapping at his sealed mouth, licking up the blood that’s coated his chin. 

He wants to cry that he isn’t. That he never was, but he can’t find the words past the blood filling his mouth and the pain ripping through his nerves. Doesn’t dare open his mouth anyway for fear of granting her an unintended invitation. It’s impossible that his heart is still beating with her hand clenched tight around it, but it pounds as erratically as ever, and she’s feeding off of it...off of him. Growing larger and larger beside him like a leech. 

He’s not. 

He’s not. 

He’s not. 

His eyes close and he tries to block her out. Focus on anything that isn’t the shape of a hand around his heart, or how her arm feels buried in his chest. How his lungs press against her with each breath. Tries to ignore the searching swipes of her tongue and the hungry grunts that follow. It’s hard. There’s no measurement for the amount of pain he’s in. It’s everything. It’s his world now, his universe. It’s every single one of his nerve endings set on fire, his cells down to the atoms screaming. It’s too much pain to be conscious, but he’s here and he can’t escape it. He’s almost positive that he’s dead and this is just what death is- agony, unending pain, and his mother. 

It’s what he deserves, isn’t it? He’d been happy when she died. Happier than he’d ever remembered being before. It hadn’t lasted long, but he’d smiled when they called him at his office. Felt his cheeks hurt with the force of his grin as the caretakers he’d put in charge of her dwindling heath offered him their condolences. What kind of son did something like that? What kind of son openly celebrated the loss of his own mother? 

Memory has been such a fickle thing over the years, but it’s been flooding back with a vengeance since he crossed the town limits. His mother’s lies, her cruelty. The way she’s carved him down to something moldable and formed him into this carbon copy of his father. Did he deserve that too? 

He didn’t. He didn’t deserve that, and he sure as fuck didn’t deserve this. 

You’re braver than you think. 

Richie’s words come back like a beam of light breaking through cracks in the rocks around him. Lancing deep into the soft tissue of his mind, past the pain and the guilt and the self-hatred. His head turns away from the searching tongue, mouth twisting in a grimace. “I’m not. Weak.” 

“Don’t fight me, Eddie.” She growls- It growls. Not his mother, never his mother, though It still wears her face. It’s hand still curls around his heart. It gives a tug, like It’s going to rip his heart out from his chest, then bursts into childish glee when he screams. 

He’s so fucking tired. He’s exhausted. Of this- of being so fucking afraid all the time, and for what? Because his mother loved him? Because she was sick and she took that sickness out on him- because he’d had no one there to tell him it wasn’t his fault? None of it was his fucking fault. 

Somehow he still has control of his hands. Somehow they listen when he tells them to grab onto the arm shoved into his chest. “I’m. Not. Weak.” He digs his fingers into that dirty old nylon, clenches his jaw, and pulls. 

“Eddie-bear!” 

“Don’t fucking call me that!” He spits, and there’s more blood in his mouth, and Christ, more fucking pain. So much fucking pain, but he’s pulling and the arm is moving and that’s all that matters. “You’re not her! She’s dead! She’s fucking dead and it was the happiest fucking day of my life!” 

The thing that claims to be his mother lets out an inhuman sound. A scream that’s somehow Sonia, Myra, the Clown, and the Leper all at once. It makes him flinch, his heart stuttering in the creature’s grasp. 

“I don’t deserve this.” He’s crying, sobbing through the pain and the rage, digging his fingers as hard as he can into the appendage in his chest. His head turns, eyes finally able to focus, to see It for what It really was. See his mother for what she really was. A clown. A bully. A monster hiding under his bed. He grinds his teeth, grits them together hard enough that he swears he can hear them crack. “I didn’t fucking deserve you.” 

He rips the arm out of his chest with everything he has. The sound of tearing flesh drowned out by his own screams. The agony overwhelms him, floods over his senses, and brings the darkness back down like a rock dropping onto his head. 

\-----

I don’t deserve this. 

You’re braver than you think. 

It kills monsters...if you believe it does…

  
I made It small…

I didn’t deserve you. 

Air comes back into his lungs with a frantic gasp, hands automatically slapping against his chest. The first thing he notices is there’s no arm. Then...there’s no hole. The gaping wound in his chest, torn bigger by his fight, is gone. The only evidence that it was ever even there to begin with is the warm, wet blood, still soaking into his shirt and sweater. 

Even the fabric is healed. 

For a moment Eddie doesn’t know how to process. He lays where they left him, breathing hard and staring wide eyed at the opposite end of the narrow cavern. His hands drop to his sides and he flinches when his fingers brush against something that isn’t rock. Gaze snapping down as his fingers fist into the leather fabric of Richie’s jacket. 

“Richie…” 

“Oh shit. Richie.” His head snaps up towards the entrance of the main chamber. Sound rushing back into the world like water speeding down a pipe. The Loser’s voices ring out and echo off the walls, tired and battered, but alive. 

Frantically, Eddie fists the jacket to his chest and scrambles to his feet. His head spins and he has to catch himself against the cave wall to stop a wave of nausea, which quickly turns into a surge of bloody vomit. Concern flares, a thread of panic trying desperately to take hold, but he shoves it back and refocuses. 

If he was going to fucking die it would have happened already. 

Wiping at his mouth, he hobbles his way up the incline and out through the gap in the wall. Eyes adjusting to the unnatural brightness of the deadlights as he searches the chamber for his friends. 

“You’re a clown!” 

“A mimic!” 

“An old woman!” 

Their screams are hoarse but powerful, Pennywise is stumbling back from them like a wounded animal, as they circle It. Eddie feels a primal sense of pride flooding through him at the sight. They’re like a pack of wolves sensing weakness, hackles raised as they close their ranks around their prey. 

“You’re a fat fucking bitch!” He yells across the chamber, and his voice makes Richie’s head snap up eyes wild behind his glasses. 

“Richie! Focus!” Mike yells, drawing his attention back to the fight. They’re in the center now, in the space where Pennywise landed. The others either didn’t hear Eddie’s voice or didn’t register it. 

Richie is momentarily distracted by a spindly leg, ripping it free of its socket, while Eddie makes his way closer. He gets to the edges of the black cradle just as Pennywise deflates into the ground, gasping pitifully up at them. 

Pennywise is the one that notices him first. It sneers, hissing up at him. “Hooooow-” The word flowing out on a wheezing breath. 

“I told death to fuck off.” Eddie spits, straightening his shoulders. The others are all looking at him; mixed expressions of relief and shock, but Eddie pays them no mind. He steps into the circle they’ve created, and reaches down into that monster’s chest and curls his fingers around It’s heart. “Now it’s my turn.” 

He closes his fist and squeezes. 

\----

Eddie Kaspbrak died because his mother loved him. She loved him too much, in all the wrong ways, and he’d let her do it. For forty years he shambled through existence as a walking corpse with no sense of direction, because his mother had scraped out everything about him that made him who he was. 

Watching his blood swirl around him in the green waters of the quarry, Eddie thinks about the life he now remembers, and feels a burning hatred for the woman who’d stolen so much from him. Not just his friends, but his identity. Who was he, really? Who was Eddie Kaspbrak? 

Staring at his own bloodsoaked hands he doesn’t think he’s fit to answer that question. In fact he’s almost positive that if he could see his reflection in the water any clearer, he wouldn’t even recognize his own face. 

It doesn’t scare him though...not knowing. 

“You alright Eds?” Richie’s voice is cautious, like everything about him has been since they climbed up out of that hellhole. Like he’s terrified that one wrong move is going to shatter Eddie into a million pieces. 

Eddie kind of hates it. “I’m not going to fucking break Rich.” He’s not sure he meant to say that softer, but he’s pretty sure he didn’t mean for it to have quite as much bite as it does. Enough to make him flinch and look almost instantly apologetic at the flash of hurt in Richie’s eyes. There and gone in a nanosecond like all his overly tender emotions. As if Eddie hadn’t made it his life’s mission to learn how to read each and every emotional drive-by like a book. 

“Excuse the fuck out of me for worrying about my friend.” Those impossibly wide shoulders hunch up to his ears. “Guess I’ll go fuck myself.” 

“God. Fuck. Look, Rich. Just- stop treating me like broken glass, okay? I’m not going anywhere.” He reaches out, aiming for a wrist but catching Richie’s hand instead. Then, because they’re there already, his fingers lace themselves comfortably into place between Richie’s. “I’ve had enough people treating me like I’m delicate my whole life, I don’t want you to start doing it to.” 

Richie seems captivated by their hands for a moment, frozen in place like Eddie’s found a magic off switch. “Listen- I- ah-” he’s distracted, words stumbling momentarily, before he’s focusing back on Eddie’s face. “Sorry. I was just- fuck Eddie. I thought I- I thought we’d lost you..” 

Eddie’s face softened, and he gave their combined hands a squeeze, head shaking. “C’mon Richie, you know better than that. How can I leave you to mess with these assholes by yourself, huh? Who else is going to laugh at your shit jokes?” 

“Is that you saying you think I’m funny, Kaspbrak?” 

  
“No, it’s me saying I’m the only one willing to stoop low enough to give you a pity laugh.” 

“Fuck off.” Richie sends a jet of water at him and he does his best to retaliate. Their splashes draw the attention of the other Losers, until they’re all laughing and screaming at each other. It’s summer all over again, or close to it, though one of them is missing. Sat up in a hospital room in Georgia somewhere. 

The Quarry, The Kissing Bridge, and the Townhouse: Eddie never lets go of Richie’s hand. 

Eddie Kaspbrak lives. 


End file.
